What can we learn from LEGOs?

Are you a Lego fan? I grew up playing LEGOs with my sisters for hours. We had the whole works. The house, the small legos, the bigger ones….the ones that allowed us to build more sophisticated houses, with the furniture…oh those were the simpler times. A few decades later, when my daughter was a little one..she entertained herself for hours with this leading brand. And now my 2 year old toddler, among others entertains himself with LEGOs while developing his motor-skills. So, what is the secret of the success of LEGOs?

It is a brand that applies and can entertain a wide range of children and adults too. It is addictive, if you are creative and good with your hands; but most importantly it constantly remains relevant by aligning itself with quality, innovation, whilst staying true to its own brand identity. Plus, they have managed to remain abreast using social media in a killer way, for everyone to learn from them. So, let’s check out a few of their strategies and learn from this beloved and globally embraced brand.

The Golden Brickies
Who doesn’t know the Oscar’s nominations right? LEGO was creative enough to invent their very own Oscar style awards ceremony entitled “The Golden brickies”, which awards the best LEGO Star Wars themed image, video or LEGO creation, hosting various categories. LEGO created unique content for each of its social media properties, encouraging fans to follow them across different channels with enticing messages, to keep their audiences’ attention span alive. Via this smart cross-channel strategy they successfully attempted to drive traffic and achieve growth for each of their channels.

The ceremony itself takes place at Legoland Windsor. In order to participate you have to submit your creation with the hashtag #GoldenBrickies on their Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram channel. The competition is receiving a lot of engagement and shares, helping grow its social media communities by encouraging conversations, comments and participation.

LEGO Bus Stop
Who likes waiting for a bus? To commemorate Transport for London (TfL) Year of the Bus, which celebrated its 100 years since London buses were sent to the Western Front in WW1, as well as the 60th anniversary of the Routemaster, a new bus stop made entirely out of Lego by Hamley's was built outside its Regent Street store with more than 100,000 bricks, in June 2013.

They combined creativity, put some fun in this tedious mundane daily ordeal of waiting for a bus, and created some positive awareness and a lot of buzz around their brand. Not to mention all the traction it achieved on Twitter where thousands of people based in London went to check it out and had to take a picture to commemorate this moment.

The Awesome Alliance
Following the success of the LEGO movie, LEGO launched “the Awesome Alliance” which is a very creative video centric website which encourages users to sign up to the alliance, where they are given a mission. Once the users fulfill their mission they can upload photos to the website from their smartphone and also via Facebook and Instagram. The images are then voted for by other Alliance members and for each social media site they use, 500 points are added to their score – thus encouraging users to access more than one of their LEGO. Entries that score the highest points win LEGO prizes.

This is a great example of how to use multi-channel marketing, encouraging participation from the users, instigating participation, sharing, contributing and successfully growing their online communities across multiple channels.

LEGO Ideas
LEGO Ideas entails a microsite where all LEGO fans can submit an idea, of a new LEGO product they would like to have, submit their idea and hoping that the LEGO members will vote it, so it can be made. If it reaches 10,000 supporters, it is submitted for consideration by LEGO and if successful, it is produced with a percentage of the profits going to the inventor.

It basically applies the crowdsourcing principle, which is a great way to engage with your customers. It can get already existing LEGO fans even more excited at the prospects of being involved in the process of creating a new LEGO product and making money out of its potential success too.